Stanwell laughed.  “Oh, he looked at them—­but only to confirm his reasons for rejecting them.”

“Ha! ha!  That’s right—­he wanted to refresh his memory with their badness.  But how on earth did he happen to have any doubts on the subject?  I should as soon have thought of his coming in here!”

Stanwell winced at the analogy, but replied in Caspar’s key:  “Oh, he’s not as sure of any of us as he is of you!”

The sculptor received this tribute with a joyous expletive.  “By God, no, he’s sure of me, as you say!  He and his tribe know that I’ll starve in my tracks sooner than make a concession—­a single concession.  A fellow came after me once to do an angel on a tombstone—­an angel leaning against a broken column, and looking as if it was waiting for the elevator and wondering why in hell it didn’t come.  He said he wanted me to show that the deceased was pining to get to heaven.  As she was his wife I didn’t dispute the proposition, but when I asked him what he understood by heaven he grabbed his hat and walked out of the studio. He didn’t wait for the elevator.”

Stanwell listened with a practised smile.  The story of the man who had come to order the angel was so familiar to Arran’s friends that its only interest consisted in waiting to see what variation he would give to the retort which had put the mourner to flight.  It was generally supposed that this visit represented the sculptor’s nearest approach to an order, and one of his fellow-craftsmen had been heard to remark that if Caspar had made the tombstone, the lady under it would have tried harder than ever to get to heaven.  To Stanwell’s present mood, however, there was something more than usually irritating in the gratuitous assumption that Arran had only to derogate from his altitude to have a press of purchasers at his door.

“Well—­what did you gain by kicking your widower out?” he objected.  “Why can’t a man do two kinds of work—­one to please himself and the other to boil the pot?”

Caspar stopped in his jerky walk—­the stride of a tall man attempted with short legs (it sometimes appeared to Stanwell to symbolize his artistic endeavour).

“Why can’t a man—­why can’t he?  You ask me that, Stanwell?” he blazed out.

“Yes; and what’s more, I’ll answer you:  it isn’t everybody who can adapt his art as he wants to!”

Caspar stood before him, gasping with incredulous scorn.  “Adapt his art?  As he wants to?  Unhappy wretch, what lingo are you talking?  If you mean that it isn’t every honest man who can be a renegade—­”

“That’s just what I do mean:  he can’t unless he’s clever enough to see the other side.”

The deep groan with which Caspar met this casuistry was cut short by a knock at the studio door, which thereupon opened to admit a small dapperly-dressed man with a silky moustache and mildly-bulging eyes.

“Ah, Mungold,” exclaimed Stanwell, to cover the gloomy silence with which Arran received the new-comer; whereat the latter, with the air of a man who does not easily believe himself unwelcome, bestowed a sympathetic pressure on the sculptor’s hand.